Customer Reviews

George Winston Piano Solos

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Get ready to play like George Winston ... The description does not provide a full list of scores that are included in the book, so here are the rest of them: The Cradle, Graduation, Loreta and Desiree's Bouquet Part 1, Lullaby, New Hopes Blues, Reflection, Stevenson, Thumbelina, The Twisting of the Hay Rope, (Variations on) Bamboo, The Velveteen Rabbit, Walking in the Air, Building the Snowman, and The Snowman's Music Box Dance. In my opinion, the scores seem like they are technically accurate (i.e. unabridged). And it's going to be a wonderful challenge to make them sound artistically accurate.

I have been a pianist for over 25 years and am currently a music educator. I was very excited to see Winston's work transcribed. Especially his work from the December album. Many of these are very accessible for the intermediate pianist with some more challenging sections in Carol of the Bells and Variations on Pachelbel's Canon. There were other great pieces included in this book but every song has it's fair share of errors, many of them just careless mistakes in the transcribing process. If you have a good ear these mistakes are quite obvious. If you don't mind the mistakes, enjoy. If you do, just be prepared to have a pencil ready to make corrections. The majority of the structure is there. I listened to the recordings with the music in front of me and made the corrections as I went along. Overall, I would recommend this book but I hope Winston is bit more discriminating in the future when choosing people to transcribe for him.

At last, George Winston publishes his arrangements of Thanksgiving, Carol of the Bells, Pachabel's Canon, some blues and lots more. You don't have to be a concert pianist to play any of these arrangements. Some of the music is "made" by the pedaling and sustaining of the notes - this is awesome if you ever wondered,"How does he get that sound?" The notation is clear and composed to the CD. This is a wonderful musical buffet of George Winston's styles and sound. Truly enjoyable. I do hope he will publish more.

I was very glad to see that George Winston finally published some of his arrangements, mainly because I have had the benefit of other transcriptions that have been circulating the Internet for at least 10 years. So, I figured I owed Winston the purchase.

I am (just mildly) disappointed in the book, only because Winston say he plays by ear and the music was transcribed by someone else, with Winston reviewing the transcriptions. The Internet transcriptions that were already available for Carol of the Bells and Joy are actually slightly "better" than the ones in the book (especially Joy). I was also hoping for a fingering hint here and there -- there are some difficult parts in Carol of the Bells in which proper finger selection can make the difference between it being playable or not, and the right choice isn't at all obvious. The books only has the notes and chord symbols, which I suppose is fine for the advanced piano player.

Still, if you have never had the benefit of seeing any of this music in print and have wanted to play Winston's music, this is a very nice book. There are some pieces in here I've never seen before that I'm sure I will enjoy.

I have been a George Winston fan for a LONG time, so I was so excited to get the news that he had published a music book, since I had read that he would never do so. The songs are beautiful and so much fun to play. Most of them aren't too hard. Prelude/Carol of the Bells is my favorite, but I also like Thanksgiving, Longing, and New Hope Blues. This is a wonderful book!

As an accomplished sight-reader, it's great to have this George Winston collection. However, I have to take off a star for the many errors and illogical settings. It seems apparent to me that the "someone else" who transcribed his performances was an electronic keyboard or computer and Hal Leonard didn't work very hard to improve the computer's setting of the music. Besides just plain wrong notes, we get impossible ottava markings and weird stuff like two-note arpeggios. Lovely music but I'd rather save my pencil for interpretive markings instead of endless corrections.

I've loved me some GW for a long time. I've got two teenagers that asked for this book of sheet music for Christmas, and santa came through. I might have guessed that this music would be too tough for them to play, but both of them are playing their favorite pieces and sounding great. They told me that it's not as hard to play as you might think just listening to George play.

Very highly recommended by me (and my kids as well).

I was very happy to see this item for sale. I have long been a fan of George Winston and have long wanted to see his music available in print. However, this is a collection of poor transcriptions. In transcriptions of this type, I would expect a wrong note here or there, a missed accidental now and then, and not the most accurate of rhythms. But these transcriptions go well beyond that. "Thanksgiving," for example, I have performed publicly; but an acceptable performance would not have been possible from the printed score alone. I needed to listen to the recording several times while following along with the score and making corrections--not all the corrections, this is somewhat improvisatory music, after all, but the major ones (and there were quite a number of big bloopers needing correction!).

Needless to say, even knowing what I know now, I would still buy this collection to have the outlines of these pieces available since I am a fan of George Winston's music. Hopefully, more of his music becomes available... but more carefully edited!

I love George Winston's music and the fact that I gave this book 3 stars has nothing to do with the quality of his compositions. However, while I was learning "Prelude/Carol of the Bells", I noticed some fairly egregious errors in the transcription. It would be one thing if there were some small formatting errors, but I'm talking about blatantly incorrect pitches that don't even fall within the chords indicated above the staff. I have confirmed these errors by comparing the sheet music with the original recordings.

A cursory look at some of the other pieces in this collection revealed more small errors. The best thing to do if you want to learn Winston's pieces note-for-note would be to compare these transcriptions against the original recordings. In other words, use this volume as a guide but don't trust it completely.

The music is wonderful, but the many errors in the transcription are frustrating. Are any of you willing to share a list of the errors/corrections you've made? I'd greatly appreciate it.